"That's the dreadful part of it. The dreams are _not_ meaningless. They seem cumulative; cumulative and planned. Each night they grow more vivid, and I see more of that green, shining place under the sea. I get closer and closer to those black shadows swimming there; those shadows that I know aren't shadows but something worse. I see more each night. It's like a sketch I'd block out, gradually adding more and more until----" Hedwig watched his patient keenly. He suggested "Until----?" But Dean's tense face relaxed. He had caught himself just in time. "No, Doctor Hedwig. You must be right. It's overwork and nervousness, as you say. If I believed what the Mexicans had told me about Morella Godolfo--well, I'd be mad and a fool." "Who is this Morella Godolfo? Some woman who has been filling you with foolish tales?" Dean smiled. "No need to worry about Morella. She was my great-great-grand-aunt. She used to live in the San Pedro house and started the legends, I think." Hedwig had been scribbling on a slip of paper. "Well, I see, young man! You heard these legends; your imagination ran riot; you dreamed. This prescription will fix you up." "Thanks." Dean took the paper, lifted his hat from the table, and started for the door. In the doorway he paused, smiling wryly. "But you're not quite correct in thinking the legends started me dreaming, Doctor. I began to dream before I learned the history of the house." And with that he went out. * * * * * Driving back to San Pedro, Dean tried to understand what had happened to him. But always he came up against a blank wall of impossibility. Any logical explanation wandered off into a tangle of fantasy. The one thing he could not explain--which Doctor Hedwig had not been able to explain--was the dreams. The dreams started soon after he came into his legacy; this ancient house north of San Pedro, which had so long stood deserted. The place was picturesquely old, and that attracted Dean from the first. It had been built by one of his ancestors when the Spaniards still ruled California. One of the Deans--the name was Dena, then--had gone to Spain and returned with a bride. Her name was Morella Godolfo, and it was this long-vanished woman about whom all the subsequent legends centered. Even yet there were wrinkled, toothless Mexicans in San Pedro who whispered incredible tales of Morella Godolfo--she who had never grown old and who had a weirdly evil power over the sea. The Godolfos had been among the proudest families of Granada, but furtive legends spoke of their intercourse with the terrible Moorish sorcerers and necromancers. Morella, according to these same hinted horrors, had learned uncanny secrets in the black towers of Moorish Spain, and when Dena had brought her as his bride across the sea she had already sealed a pact with dark Powers and had undergone a _change_.